It's Electric!

Pictured to the left, is an artist's rendition of an Electric Slide. You may have heard of "The Electric Slide", a group dance often done at wedding receptions, and quite often, done very badly. In fact, in my side-job as a DJ for such functions, "Slide Time" has become a fun diversion from the normal blathering of requests that nobody other than the requester would ever care to hear.. It's a time when young and old join together to collide in a giggling trainwreck of semi-synchronized stepping, lunging, and yes - smashing into each other. Honestly, someone usually ends up on their back before the song's over. It's a tradition!!

BUT - did you know that the steps that make up this treasured dance didn't just come together over the dancefloors of the ages, but instead were choreographed by a man named Richard Silver? I didn't either! It turns out he created the steps in 1976 (probably to put a smack-down on all those punks doing The Hustle for free) but didn't get around to copyrighting them until 2004. What?? You can copyright dance steps?? Apparently so. And since you can copyright them, you can go completely Rufus and sue people and organizations that you believe are abusing your rights.

In 2007, what's the biggest source of entertaining videos of people dancing badly? Did you say YouTube? CORRECT! So YouTube is suddenly being swamped with demands from lil' Richie Silver demanding that they remove any videos of his masterpiece being desecrated. I actually find that I'm at a loss for words to describe just how insane this whole situation is. So I'll just point you to the original article here.

And the next time you're at a wedding, watch out! If somebody has a camcorder present, you could find yourself in violation of international copyright law! Forget downloading movies, the REAL crime is screwing up The Electric Slide.